After storyboarding and brainstorming about the little mermaid fairy tale, Abby and I wanted to tell the story of little mermaid giving up her life to be a human from a first-person perspective. Instagram account will be a platform for her to tell her side of the story as well as making a call to action. The videos and posts are filmed through her eyes.
Revised Story:
Ariel is just like any other career woman who works in New York City, but little did people know, she had another life, a past mermaid life. Her home under the water used to be a paradise. Her backyard was full of fish and coral reef. Ariel’s family and her lived a beautiful life until she noticed little pieces of unknown objects flowed into her home and surrounded areas. There were more and more unknown items over the years that have polluted the sea floor that she and her neighbors lived in. There was no longer a paradise but a liveiless place. That’s when she started to discover what those unknown items are, which led her to find out more about humans and life above the water. She decided to give up her mermaid life to save her loved home by telling her stories to humans.
We also watched a documentary about coral bleaching, which is so inspirational. The documentary mentioned that it's hard to get people to care about the ocean because it's so far away and people don't see or hear about it everyday. That's when we are confident about our decision of making a social media account, so hopefully it will get more attraction about the ocean pollution issue we're facing.
After we wrote the revised story, we divided the story up into five sections. We wrote it out what the narration should be, what clips should be there and what type of audio should match each section (see the screen shot below).
Abby recorded the narration and some part of the clips. I did the research and other part of the clips. Then, we combined all the pieces together, and edit it over and over again. We decided to add the caption as well because accessibility is important when we use social media.
Final Results
Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/once.a.little.mermaid/
Part 1
Part 2
Challenges
Overall, it was a great collaboration experience with Abby, and it was nice to have someone who I can bounce ideas and problem with. The ideation phase was the hardest part. We started off with a list of stories that could be possibly rewrote. I had to study writing techniques for retelling stories. After a lot of rewriting and brainstorming, we landed on the little mermaid story.
It was inconvenient to collaborate on Premier Pro. The process of importing and exporting can take a long time with slow WiFi, but we made it happen!
What's next?
We managed to get 15 followers within a few days of creating the instagram account, which means people are interested in what we're working on. If we have free time, we will definitely keep posting contents because we both do care a lot about climate change and ocean pollution. We have a couple of ideas for what to post next, for example, short educational clips about coral bleaching and trash collection pieces around the city harbor.
Overall...
I learned a lot from this project and from my teammate, Abby. I had very little knowledge about film making and Premier Pro when i first started this project. Through self-learning and practice, I feel very comfortable with the tool and basic editing techniques, and I grow to really like editing. I will definitely keep practicing, and start to get into Unity more after this since I didn't use Unity for the final project.
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